Florida Open Government Commission
Sarasota public hearing
Testimony of Matthew Doig
Investigative reporter, Herald-Tribune,
Sarasota, Fla. February 12, 2008

Good evening. My name is Matthew Doig, and I’ve been an investigative projects reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune since 2002. The focus of my testimony is proprietary software.

In the last few years, we’ve come across more and more instances where government agencies have hired private companies to manage their information. This has resulted in three major obstacles we continue to encounter when making requests for public records:

1. Flat-out denial: Everyone would agree that the Sarasota Police Department’s arrest records, the county’s fire response times and Manatee County’s utility records are all considered public under Florida Statute 119. But in the past few years, all three were denied over concerns that disclosure violated their contract with a private entity.
   
   We finally got the fire response data, but only after scheduling a meeting between the county attorney, our attorney and the vendor who managed the data. I’m ashamed to admit we had to give up on getting the other two because the haggling just became too time-consuming.
2. Excessive costs: Once we clear the first hurdle, we often are hit with an eye-popping price tag. The police department wanted $7,500 when we asked for the arrest records, and that didn’t even buy us the actual data we wanted. Those costs were just to determine what type of information was stored in the database. There are plenty of reasons why that charge was unreasonable, but the simple explanation is that the private company charged the city a consultant fee of $125 per hour – and they unsuccessfully tried to pass those costs over to us.
3. Limited format: Let’s say an agency videotapes a public official’s 20-minute press conference, and the official slurs his words and is mostly incoherent. If we requested a copy of the tape, and the agency told us all we could have was a 2-minute, edited version of the tape where the official comes across as eloquent, that would not be considered compliance with the public records law.
   
   But when it comes to data, we are often told that all we can have is a report generated from the raw data. Last year we requested the Charlotte Sheriff’s staff/payroll database as part of a project to show readers whether their tax dollars had been misspent. The sheriff’s office said we could only have what they got from their vendor – a report. While a report can give us what we want, we have to trust that all of what we want is actually there. Also, reports typically add a lot of extraneous clutter that we don’t need, such as who ordered the report, the date, etc. This extra information can repeat itself thousands of times in the data, making analysis troublesome. When we asked for the data in its original form, and not as a report, we were told it was “impossible.”

I’ve submitted a number of e-mail exchanges from the past few years that touch on these issues. You’ll notice that these problems have become so commonplace that I now include the relevant portions of 119 in any records requests involving data.

Here are some thoughts/suggestions:

1. It’s likely that all over the state, government agencies have signed agreements with private companies that effectively prevent access to public records. The law already says that can’t be done, so how does the message get out so we stop fighting that battle?
2. The law establishes clear guidelines for the cost of duplicating paper records, but is vague when it comes to duplication of electronic records. If a programmer employed by the government makes $25/hour, should the public be forced to pay a private programmer $120/hour just because the agency has farmed out the work?
3. Requests for data should not require excessive programming costs – it’s a relatively simple process akin to copying a Word document from your computer onto a CD. The law should require that all databases be built in a way that can be easily copied, or that copying costs beyond the price of a CD or DVD are the responsibility of the record holder.

Testimony before Commission on Open Government Reform in Sarasota